Wednesday, May 07, 2008

COMPOSITION 1 - For Layout and BG artists - part 1 - Framing

Mary Blair is not only great at color, she is great at composition. A lot of young (and old) artists who say they love Mary Blair's work think they like it because it is simple and stylized. They miss what's really important in her work-fantastic art principles-like composition, the way she arranges the parts of her pictures into a clear and beautiful, functional statement.Her art is completely logical.

So should ours be.

I see many so-called "stylized" cartoons today -the flat ones- that are cluttered with wonky flat shapes tossed onto the screen in no coherent order, as if they just fell onto the page and where they landed, there they stayed.

Composition is another lost principle of modern cartoons.This is a big manual all about how to arrange imageswithin your scenes so that they are easy to readand aesthetically pleasing to look at.

I made a series of manuals to help service studiosunderstand the Layout drawings we would send them for The Ripping Friendsbecause we found they would throw out all ofJim Smith's, John Dorman's and my drawings andredraw them in a cluttered, stiff, evenly spacedwonky style.

The manuals didn't work because they were never opened,but maybe you can find some use for the principles within.If you ever want to do layouts or BGs for me, please learn this stuff first.

29 comments:

Is it possible to convert the complete manual to a PDF format and offer it for download, or do you just have a hardcopy version of the manual? This would be a good thing for layout/BG artists to have as a reference.

An older guy once told me that a bad idea can live through a strong presentation.The compositions in mary's work is as equaly good as the quality of the art itself.Just like Will esiner.His panels and compositioning where used as a storytelling tool as much as his artwork and actual story.

Thanks a lot for your blog, John. Its really good to have a pro with not only a critical opinion, but also a helpful one. I've been noticing for the past several years now that it seems animation design is designed for animation designers, comic books are drawn for comic book artists, and children's books are illustrated for other illustrators. It would be nice to see creative people get back to who should be their main target - the audience (if they haven't been lost).

Thanks a lot for your blog, John. Its really good to have a pro with not only a critical opinion, but also a helpful one. I've been noticing for the past several years now that it seems animation design is designed for animation designers, comic books are drawn for comic book artists, and children's books are illustrated for other illustrators. It would be nice to see creative people get back to who should be their main target - the audience (if they haven't been lost).

Kickass tips. I'm scheming up a personal animation project, and this stuff is invaluable.

I was reading over the production blog of "Foster's Home of Imaginary Friends", and my heart sunk when they showed the production process. On the wall, were numerous slits of paper pinned up as they typically are for storyboarding, but to my dismay they were filled with WORDS and not pictures. Giant fucking paragraphs on each piece. This was step one. Step two was even worst. . .a big thick pile of script. Absolutely no imagery. The next step was then the voice recording, and I didn't even bother finishing the read.

I've never been able to sit through an episode of this show, and now it makes sense why. The character animation is merely a recycling of pre-set rigs. Nothing new. Might as well make it a radio program.

Great information, I'm not sure if the Milt Gross stuff is the best example as the has a tendency to get his figures to close to his frames , thus crowding the space, but he was brilliant and horse one is amazing. You touched on it well, but you can't place enough emphasis on:

Layout and composition is to lead the viewers eye. Balanced, same size elements are static and flatten, odd shapes when done right please the eye. and lead to to where you want the view to look. but you said that... Maybe you haven't got to elements that point to the characters as well as frame them and the dangers of tangents... I hope is coming.

Just wanted to let you know that I'm using a lot of these concepts in my graphic design. I know what you REALLY want is trained animators, but perhaps the fact that your lessons have such wide application will give you some kind of fulfillment.